Part of me wonders if things could improve if the resources put towards "drug discovery" could go further if they were allocated to tooling to allow for individuals to synthesize drugs tailored to their present state.
With increasingly more data available on the drugs released by FDA, EMA, etc, combined with cheap genetic sequencing and other measurements, part of me wonders if the statistical approaches with some sub fields of chemistry combined with bioinformatics could move things from the era where certain drugs are produced in mass to one where getting certain interactions with compounds to take place based on and individuals state.
Razib Kahn talks[0] about this recently:
"There’s a debate that periodically crops up online about the utility, viability, and morality of returning results from genetic tests to consumers. Consumers here means people like you or me. Pretty much everyone.
If you want to caricature two stylized camps, there are information maximalists who proclaim a utopia now, where people can find out so much about themselves through their genome. And then there are information elitists, who emphasize that the public can’t handle the truth. Or, more accurately, that throwing information without context and interpretation from someone who knows better is not just useless, it’s dangerous.
Of course, most people will stake out more nuanced complex positions. That’s not the point. Here is my bottom-line, which I’ve probably held since about ~2010:
- The value for most people in actionable information in direct-to-consumer genetics is probably not there yet when set against the cost.
- With the reduction in the cost of genotyping and sequencing, there’s no way that we have enough trained professionals to handle the surfeit of information. And there will really be no way in 10 years when a large proportion of the American population will be sequenced.
"
[0]https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/04/10/notes-from-the-per...